The bloody siege by security forces of a village in the coastal Qatif region of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province has left at least six people dead and a number of others wounded.

The assault, described by Saudi officials as a “preemptive” security operation, saw heavily armed troops storm the village of Al-Jish after surrounding it for 15 hours. The Saudi regime claimed that the operation was aimed at capturing “terrorists” and that those killed had been given a chance to surrender but died in an “exchange of fire”.

No credibility whatsoever can be given to this official story from a monarchical dictatorship that describes anyone who opposes its rule or dares to insult the Saudi king or the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as a “terrorist”, whose offenses are punishable by beheading.

The leader of the 2011 protests, the Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, who called for an end to the monarchy, was executed in January 2016, along with 46 others on charges of “terrorism.” Forty-three were beheaded, and four were shot to death by firing squads.

The brutal repression has left the region, which is a center of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, but whose population is the poorest in the country, seething. Sporadic demonstrations have continued, even as the Saudi regime maintains what amounts to a military occupation.

In 2017, dozens were killed in protests over the regime’s decision to raze the historic Musawara district in Awamiyah, which had been al-Nimr’s hometown. Some 30,000 people fled the town to escape the state terror. The pounding of Awamiyah into rubble was executed shortly after Crown Prince bin Salman took the reins of power.

The Saudi regime has continued to carry out arrests, imprisonment and executions of Shia prisoners convicted in rigged trials. Among those on the Saudi death row, threatened with beheading, is Isra al-Ghomgham and her husband, Moussa al-Hashem, along with three others, who were convicted under Saudi Arabia’s notorious 2017 “counter-terrorism” law of the “crimes” of peacefully protesting against the dictatorship, chanting anti-regime slogans and posting videos of the protests on social media.

The repression in the Eastern Province is bound up with Saudi Arabia’s regional role in promoting war against Iran along with terrorism and violence against non-Sunni populations. Among the motives for the US-backed Saudi war against Yemen, pitting the region’s richest nation against its poorest, is the fear that the rise of the [Yemeni] Houthi rebels, who follow an offshoot of Shiism, could inspire a revolt by the impoverished working class Shia population.

Unable to achieve its objectives in Yemen, despite a savage war that has claimed the lives of at least 60,000 people and brought two-thirds of the population to the brink of starvation, the Saudi monarchy has also proven incapable of suppressing social unrest in the Eastern District and elsewhere.

During the course of the assassination, bin Salman sent at least 11 messages to al-Qahtani. The leader of the assassination team was recorded by Turkish intelligence as telling Qahtani, “tell your boss” that the job had been completed.

Qahtani has been reported sighted in various parts of Saudi Arabia and is apparently not being detained or being brought into the Saudi court. His prosecution would only point to bin Salman’s role as the chief instigator of the murder.

In a conference call with the media, a senior US State Department official said that the Trump administration was “pleased” to see the beginning of the trial of the alleged Khashoggi assassins but added that the legal process had not yet “hit that threshold of credibility and accountability.”

While the brazenness of the Khashoggi assassination triggered a brief wave of protest within the US political establishment and the media—including a Time magazine cover—the issue has now been largely dropped.

Under a deal approved by the State Department last month, nearly $200 million worth of upgrades to Saudi Arabia’s missile defense systems are being carried out by American military contractors.

Meanwhile, the weapons used in the repression of oppressed workers in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern District are largely supplied by the US, while the special operation troops that carry it out are trained and advised by the US military.